II THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 51 
Such are the most essential characteristics of 
species. Even were man not one of them—a 
_ member of the same system and subject to the 
same laws—the question of their origin, their 
causal connexion, that is, with the other phzeno- 
mena of the universe, must have attracted his 
_ attention, as soon as his intelligence had raised 
itself above the level of his daily wants. 
Indeed history relates that such was the case, 
and has embalmed for us the speculations upon 
the origin of living beings, which were among the 
earliest products of the dawning intellectual activity 
of man. In those early days positive knowledge 
was not to be had, but the craving after it needed, 
at all hazards, to be satisfied, and according to the 
country, or the turn of thought, of the speculator, 
the suggestion that all living things arose from the 
mud of the Nile, from a primeval egg, or from some 
more anthropomorphic agency, afforded a sufficient 
resting-place for his curiosity. The myths of 
Paganism are as dead as Osiris or Zeus, and the 
/ 
man who should revive them, in opposition to the , 
knowledge of our time, would be justly laughed to 
scorn ; but the coeval imaginations current among 
the rude inhabitants of Palestine, recorded by 
writers whose very name and age are admitted by 
every scholar to be unknown, have unfortunately 
not yet shared their fate, but, even at this day, are 
regarded by nine-tenths of the civilised world as 
the authoritative standard of fact and the criterion 
E 2 
